IT is frighteningly easy to be complacent about future food supplies when you have plenty.

Without its own internal food supply and with a rising world population, the UK leaves itself wide open to serious food shortages and serious price rises.

We hear a lot about Fair Trade, but when retailers offer cut-price milk, British dairy farmers bear the cost.

Over the last ten years retailers have increased their share of the retail price of milk from 19.5 to 34.4 per cent, while the percentage received by the farmers who produce the milk has decreased.

Unfair Trade is putting our future food supplies in danger and while retailers continue to post healthy profits, where will food come from if British farmers go out of business?

Keeping your head above water while working at a loss with no sign of improvement can only last so long, and is leading one by one to dairy farmers gradually sinking out of existence.

Kathleen Calvert, Paythorne, Clitheroe.